


Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Legal Marriage in England and Wales, Low-key, Quiet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 12:10:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1387126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I hadn't planned on it. I ought to be doing other things. But, honestly, the legalization of gay marriage in England and Wales does seem worthy of a short tale...and Mycroft and Greg obliged with something small and quiet and quirky. I hope it pleases, even if they refused to conform to the norm...</p><p>Stubborn men. Quirky, stubborn darlings...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand

There were the speeches by the pols, Mycroft thought, and the endless hoopla on the telly, and of course the rainbow flag over Whitehall, which seemed to him both necessary and tastelessly gauche all at once. It had arrived. He turned the notion over in his mind, testing it the way a toddler might turn a pebble or a pillbug or a pansy over in his mouth—curious. Bemused. Perhaps a faint notion that this was nothing to which he was accustomed.

He stood on the roof of MI6’s headquarters, popularly known as “Babylon-on-Thames.” He looked out over his kingdom—London. Bells were ringing. Birds flying. Couples no doubt marrying in droves.

“Anthea said I’d find you up here,” Lestrade said, his footsteps gritching across the sanded tarpaper of the roof. “Hiding from too much hearty congratulation?”

“How well you know me,” Mycroft murmured, mouth twisting in a wry, sardonic smile. “In full, panicked retreat, I’m afraid. One more person telling me it’s a great day and I swear I will scream.”

“No you won’t,” Lestrade said, grinning. “Not you. You’ll say something tart enough to make lemonade for all London, give your entire staff the hairy eyeball, and go swanning out of the office as though ‘gay marriage’ was right up there with blaspheming the queen and insulting English beer.”

“Oh, come, now,” Mycroft muttered. “It’s not as though I _disapprove_.”

“No. You just hate mob mentality—and the first day of legal gay marriage feels like mob mentality.” He slid Mycroft a crafty glance. “How many people have asked you when you’re planning on tying the knot today?”

Mycroft shuddered, and gave his partner the most brooding, heartfelt glance. “I stopped counting at five. That was at ten this morning, during the first break.” He sighed, then warily said, “And you?”

“Fewer people think of me as gay,” Lestrade pointed out. “Even the ones who know we’re an item still think of me as straight with a few exotic quirks.” He snorted, then said, “Even so? I think it was up to five or six by the end of the day. And the folks who are really, really _out_ got drowned.”

“It’s quite the tempest in a teapot,” Mycroft grumbled. “Entirely too breathless and amazed.”

Lestrade smiled and sat on the parapet of the building, looking out over the City below, saying nothing.

Mycroft shifted, restlessly. “Is it…?  Are you…?”

Lestrade’s eyes crinkled, and he chuckled. “Panting for a ring?” He shrugged. “Just got rid of a ring. Divorce was only finalized six months ago, after all. Still working through what I think about it all, to tell the truth.” He looked up at Mycroft, and said, with a sort of fierce but quiet conviction, “I don’t need marriage today. But—if it makes sense—I can’t help rejoice knowing that if I wanted marriage today—if _we_ wanted it today, no one could deny us. We are… What’s the word? Yeah. ‘Enfranchised.’ Today we’re weighed in the same scale, and we can’t be denied. So, yeah. That matters.” He studied the younger man. “And you, oh British Government? Has the avatar of England got an opinion other than that it’s all quite tacky and overdone?”

Mycroft laughed as Greg put on a perfect upper class posh twit voice when stating that final judgment. Greg was one of the few people who could reliably reduce him to chuckles and even giggles and snorts. “Truth?”

“What else, you great gumby?”

“Then…” He looked out over the roofs, the spires, observed the jewel-box phallus of the Gherkin at St. Mary Axe, the dome of St. Paul’s, the London Eye—the great and glorious skyline of London. He took a deep breath, and said, “Someday, my dear, if you wish and time and the fates allow, I will marry you. Given my preferences it will be a quiet wedding, almost certainly small, private, and dignified to the point of fossilization. If the Church of England comes so far, it will be a C of E ceremony, with a stuffy vicar who will nonetheless consider me far too somber for such a joyous occasion. Everyone will scold me for being too grim. Like Jane Eyre I shall quite wreck the mood by wearing grey and talking like a puritan….and inside my heart will be on fire, and the angels will be shouting ‘Halleluia.’ It will be nothing like today at all, except in one thing—today will have made it possible. For that I will forgive it all the tawdry gimcrack and tabloid spectacle.”

Lestrade snorted. “I take that to mean you’re ok with a bit of shouting, so long as you can scamper off with the goodies and go enjoy them more quietly at your leisure.”

“Quite.” Mycroft smiled, delighted as always that Lestrade was so quick to understand him. “Good God, the alternative would be to take part down there in the throng!”

“Rather than play Odin’s raven up here, and watch it all from a nice safe distance.”

“Exactly.”

Lestrade chuckled, and they were quiet for a while. Then Lestrade said, in a mild and amused tone, “And should I take that last as a proposal, or a unilateral demand?”

Mycroft huffed. “I did say ‘if you wish and time and the fates allow.’”

“True. So…proposal?”

“Merely the preliminary overtures.”

“Testing the water, as it were?”

“Dipping a toe in, yes.”

“And if the water’s fit to swim in?”

“If your response is above freezing, we can talk more at a later time. At your discretion.”

“In other words the ball’s now in my court?”

“Something like that.”

“You can wear grey,” Lestrade said, “But we get a big pipe organ and people get to throw rice at us.”

“I suppose I can unbend so far.  Mendelssohn for the recessional?”

“Actually I was thinking maybe something by John Williams. Star Wars theme, maybe. Something like that.”

Mycroft sighed. “Oh, very well. But then a double-ring ceremony, and you have to wear a morning coat.”

Lestrade laughed. “All right, all right.” He said, then, “It sounds like I’ve said yes, doesn’t it?”

Mycroft nodded.

Lestrade nodded back, and said, “Well, that’s all right, then. Knew the day was good for something.”

And they stayed there until the sun set, and the lights came up, and London was turned into Wonderland—and then they walked home together.

 

Spring is like a perhaps hand

by E. E. Cummings  
III

Spring is like a perhaps hand  
(which comes carefully  
out of Nowhere)arranging  
a window,into which people look(while  
people stare  
arranging and changing placing  
carefully there a strange  
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps  
Hand in a window  
(carefully to  
and fro moving New and  
Old things,while  
people stare carefully  
moving a perhaps  
fraction of flower here placing  
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

 


End file.
